CALIFORNIA STEM CELL BANK ESTABLISHED FOR DISEASE STUDY

California’s stem cell agency has awarded $32.3 million to establish a “stem cell bank,” consisting of cells taken from people with various diseases.

While the public often thinks of using stem cells for disease therapy, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has a different goal with this set of grants.

The cells will help researchers better study diseases for which there is no effective treatment. Moreover, testing drugs in human cells should yield superior results over animal testing, researchers say.

The record of clinical trials for such illnesses as Alzheimer’s disease, for example, is disappointing. Many drugs have shown promise in animal studies only to fail completely or show very modest efficacy in people.

The cells will be supplied from patient samples collected by seven researchers, including three at UC San Diego. They will be turned into what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells, which then grow into “adult” cells characteristic of the diseases.

UC San Diego researcher Dr. Joseph Gleeson got an $875,000 grant to supply cells from patients with childhood neurodevelopmental disorders. Other UCSD researchers getting grants were Dr. Kang Zhang, who got $1 million for diseases causing blindness, and Dr. Douglas Galasko, who got $644,000 for Alzheimer’s disease. About $26 million of the money will go to setting up the stem cell bank, the rest will go to the researchers.

The program will create about 9,000 cell lines derived from 3,000 patients. CIRM will sell these cells to academic researchers and biotech companies studying the diseases; the price hasn’t yet been set.

Two types of cells will be stored in the bank, said Kevin McCormack, a CIRM spokesman. One will be the IPS cells. The other will be “adult” cells created from the IPS cells to reflect the 11 diseases. The IPS cells will serve as controls.

IPS human stem cells are commonly grown from skin cells regressed in development to an embryonic-like state, by applying certain genes and chemicals. They can then be turned into nearly any type of cell in the body.

Unlike embryonic stem cells, IPS cells can be made from any individual. They are also free of the ethical objections many opponents of abortion make to using embryonic stem cells.

IPS cells are being examined for therapy by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute for Parkinson’s disease and the Salk Institute for sickle cell anemia, among other places. However, some diseases are so poorly understood, such as multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), that no treatment has been proven to reverse their course.

Researchers disagree about whether stem cell therapy is far enough advanced to use on such now-incurable diseases. But skeptics and supporters of stem cell therapy say “disease in a dish” studies with IPS cells will provide a wealth of new insights.